Monday, July 6, 2015

Why being on the JavaScript cutting edge matters.

The JavaScript world moves extremely fast. Almost week to week a shiny new framework or library or build tool comes out.Some people seem to feel that always moving to that latest shiny new JavaScript thing is self indulgent, trendy, hipster behaviour.In fact it makes good sense to always be finding and staying at the JavaScript cutting edge. WHY it makes sense is because JavaScript is (or was) crappy, inconsistent, hard to use and quirky and because browsers are (or were) crappy, inconsistent, hard to use and quirky.The JavaScript cutting edge in general tends to be finding more powerful and more simple ways of doing things. If you want to make life as easy for yourself as possible, you need to live at the cutting edge. Living on the JavaScript cutting edge is not a matter of being cool or distracted or trendy - for me its a matter of necessity to avoid living in the burning hellfire of bare metal JavaScript programming, in which there is nothing between you and the browser except raw JavaScript. The truly lazy programmer lives at the cutting edge of JavaScript because that's where things are easiest - until a better idea comes along next week.